[98] These released Japanese were sent to Matsumae, and, after remaining about a week, were forwarded to Yedo. The shipwrecked men did not give, so Golownin was informed, a very favorable account of their entertainment in Kamtschatka. Ryōzayemon praised Irkutsk, but represented eastern Siberia and Okhotsk as a miserable country, where scarce anybody was to be seen except beggars and government officers. He thought very meanly of the Russians, a few individuals excepted. From their military spirit, even the boys in the street playing soldier, he thought they must meditate conquest, probably that of Japan.
[99] There has been a great alteration in the last twenty years. Siebold states that sixty-eight square-rigged vessels—mostly, no doubt, American whalers—had been counted by the Japanese as passing Matsumae and Hakodate in one year. According to a memorandum furnished to Commodore Perry during his recent visit to Hakodate (May 3, 1854), there had been, in the years 1847-1851, no less than five foreign vessels wrecked in that vicinity.
[100] In Japan, as elsewhere, etiquette requires a good many things to be done under feigned pretences, and on many occasions an affected ignorance of what everybody knows. The Japanese have a particular term (naibun) to express this way of doing things.
[101] Yet Kahei wore two swords, though perhaps he did it in the character of a ship-master, or as an officer in authority in the island to which he traded from Hakodate, carrying on the fishery there chiefly by means of native Kuriles. These islands appear to have been farmed out by the government to certain mercantile firms, which thus acquire a certain civil authority over the inhabitants. The privilege of wearing swords, like other similar privileges elsewhere, is probably rather encroached upon by the unprivileged. On festival days, even the poorest inhabitants of Nagasaki decked themselves out, according to Kämpfer, with at least one sword. The present of a sword as a marriage gift—and it is ceremonies practised among the mercantile class, to which reference is made—is mentioned on p. 181.
[102] The old East India Company having become extinct, the Dutch trade to Japan had been revived as a government affair. A new Dutch East India Company having been formed, it was handed over to that company in 1827, but, after a two years’ trial, was restored again to the government, in whose hands it still remains.
[103] See London “Quarterly Review,” for July, 1819, in a note to an article on Golownin’s narrative. The statement about bartering is questionable.
[104] Siebold represents the Dutch at Deshima as humoring the Japanese antipathy to change, by adhering in their dress to the old fashion, and as rigged out in velvet coats and plumed hats, in the style of Vandyke’s pictures.
[105] A series of numbers, professing to give the substance of the recent works on Japan, principally Fisscher’s, Meylan’s, and Siebold’s, appeared in the “Asiatic Journal” during the years 1839 and 1840, and were afterwards collected and published at London in a volume, and reprinted in Harper’s Family Library, with the title of “Manners and Customs of the Japanese in the Nineteenth Century.” The same numbers, to which some others were subsequently added in the “Asiatic Journal,” were reprinted in the “Chinese Repository,” with notes, derived from the information given to the editor by the shipwrecked Japanese, whom, as mentioned above, it was attempted to carry home in the “Morrison.” In the index to the “Chinese Repository” these numbers are ascribed to a lady, a Mrs. B.
A still more elaborate and comprehensive work, based mainly on the same materials, and often drawing largely from the one above referred to, but rendered more complete by extracts from Kämpfer and Thunberg, is De Jancigny’s “Japan,” published at Paris, in 1850, as a part of the great French collection, entitled “L’univers, ou Histoire et Description de tout les Peuples.”
Neither of these works contains any account of the Portuguese missions.